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Tag Archives: New York Mets

Noam Chomsky once said that he was amazed at the insight and sophistication that the average American brought to the discussion of sports. Chomsky considered this use of brainpower to be a diversion that operated in the service of power. “One of the functions that things like professional sports play,” he said, “is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.” I guess he is right enough in his way, but for my part I hold with the literary historian Gerald Graff, who has argued that his youthful fascination with sports was not a form of anti-intellectualism, as he once thought. Instead, Graff has come to believe, fandom was a form of intellectual development by other means. Read More

I have friends who rhapsodize about their new relationships with unabashed stars in their eyes. “How’s it going?” you ask a few weeks later, only to be told, “Oh—he was a sociopath!” Then you listen as your friend eviscerates this former paragon with the same enthusiasm she once brought to his glorification. I always marvel, half horrified, half admiring, at the full commitment to poor judgment, the anger unmitigated by any self-reproach or, indeed, self-consciousness. To be so free! To think not “it’s amazing that we came this far” but merely “they have let us down.”

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Lady Met, who may or may not be Mrs. Met’s mom, or Mr. Met’s mom, or his ex-spouse, or something …

You couldn’t really see out of that big head, so you’d feel someone on your leg but you couldn’t see it, and I’d have to turn my whole body and hold the head to look down—it was a little rough. Later on, I often wondered what happened to Mrs. Met, and maybe they just thought it was easier not to have to deal with all that stuff that I dealt with.

The secret lives of mascots are always interesting, inasmuch as the job involves subjugating all ego in the service of a city’s id. That’s why Mr. Met rated a documentary on ESPN. But the quote above comes from an interview with one Lynn Farrell, who played Mr. Met’s wife—or his mother, depending on whom you ask. This was Mrs. Met, née Lady Met, a mascot born early in the franchise’s life. Farrell played the mascot in her seventies-era glory years.

After some time away, Mrs. Met was reintroduced two years ago in a more modern form, which makes her story a kind of Christ narrative. It’s what every mascot yearns for: the added drama of death at the hands of Mets management in the 1980s and modern resurrection. Read More

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The other night, we had the chance to see the Mets play the Dodgers. In an effort to rally the team, the jumbotron repeatedly blared that “Everybody clap your HANDS!” command—accompanied at Citi Field by a graphic of Mr.Met leading the cheer—and we all furiously, dutifully clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clapped until Andre Ethier went down in the bottom of the ninth and we trudged sullenly onto the 7 train.

Now, a couple days later, my sore hands have ceased to ache and the smell of hot dogs has faded from my jersey—but that chant is still in my head. It follows me wherever I go, an insistent tattoo on the back of my brain. Mr. Met bobs through my dreams, clapping and beaming. Yesterday, apropos of nothing, my husband texted me the words of the chant. Periodically, the two of us break into joyless but insistent clapping.

It made me think of Mark Twain’s “A Literary Nightmare.” In the 1876 story, Twain recalls coming across the following bit of doggerel in the newspaper: Read More

A young Harper Lee, her thoughts no doubt consumed by the New York Mets.

Harper Lee fever has gripped the nation. Ever since news of her lost novel hit last week, the famously reclusive writer has been everywhere—trending on Twitter, spawning lists, smiling above the fold on the front page of today’s New York Times. Naturally, there’s been as much controversy as delight: Is the elderly author being taken advantage of? Does she want the book released? According to her lawyer, the author is humiliated by such allegations.

Whatever you think about the release of the novel, the whole thing has started to feel a bit squicky, or at the very least odd. All of this has so little to do with the woman herself. Or so I declared self-righteously to my head over the weekend, when I resolved to take an attitude of superior distaste towards the whole business. When I saw a feature on Harper Lee’s New York in the New York Post, my lip curled. Until, that is, I glanced at the annotated map and saw that it listed—along with the Yorkville flat where Lee lived off and on for decades, Capote’s Brooklyn Heights home, and the offices of agent Maurice Crain—the old Shea Stadium. Read More

Looking at this year’s Best Picture nominees, I realized that while I had liked three, nine out of nine had made me tear up—including The Wolf of Wall Street. Fellow movie criers will understand. Especially for those of us who might hesitate to cry in the light of day, there is a singular pleasure to letting tears flow, even—or maybe especially—when what’s happening on screen is really stupid. I come by this honestly. My father refuses to see any movie in which a child dies.

This outpouring of emotion is not limited to the cinema; after watching Audra McDonald and Norm Douglas perform “Bess You Is My Woman Now” in the recent revival of Porgy and Bess, my mom and I were so overcome that we had to skip the second act and go get a drink across the street. And the list of songs I can’t listen to dry-eyed is so long that I’ve had to quarantine them in their own Spotify playlist. But movies are the biggest culprit.

The first movie that made me inconsolable was Dumbo—“Baby Mine,” of course, after he’s been taken from his mother—and the second, I believe, was Chipmunk Adventure, after the baby penguin is taken from his mother. My brother and I both sobbed so loudly in Land Before Time (after the baby dinosaur is taken from his mother) that we had to leave the theatre. Thank God we were never exposed to Bambi. (My mother, traumatized to realize that she was “Man,” resolved at age five to spare her own kids the same shock.) Read More